


Four for Girls

by ishafel



Series: Same Old Story [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alpha/Omega, Alternate Universe, M/M, Mpreg, Post Mpreg, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 14:08:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15842883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel
Summary: The best way to make people love you is to give them what they want.





	Four for Girls

“Explain your process to me,” Sherlock says, and drops a stack of photographs on the table. “I’m told you’re quite good at what you do.”

“Quite,” Seb says dryly, flipping through them. “Are you hoping to go into the assassination business?”

“Just trying to get a feel for it. That bloke in red is your target-- there, bottom right. So--.”

He’d confiscated a fat purple crayon from Isobel earlier that morning; Seb digs it out and uses it to draw lines of sight, calculate trajectories, to demonstrate what to measure and where. “There’s a pretty decent Android app,” he says. “Mind you, the British Army would figuratively shit a brick if they knew how rarely anyone does this by hand these days.”

Sherlock watches as he writes out the equations. “It’s like watching a housecat that can count,” he says, as Seb plugs in numbers to simulate his hypothetical conditions. 

Seb would be insulted if he hadn’t heard Sherlock say much worse. Being compared to a cat is practically flattering-- he’s always liked cats. “You don’t get far without the maths,” he says mildly.

“I’m teaching Isobel geometry and fractions already. She’s made some progress, although I had hoped that by now she’d be a bit further along.”

“Spectacular.” She just turned one last week. If she actually knows what a fraction is, she’s already a genius as far as Seb’s concerned. He flips through the photos again. “Hey. Some of these are jobs I actually did. This one of the London Marathon--.” He remembers that one; he’d given up trying to find an angle and actually run it, and shot the man at mile sixteen. He still has the finisher’s medal somewhere, in the bottom of a go bag.

Sherlock’s stopped listening. Seb tosses the photos into the recycling and puts water on for tea, trying and failing not to be annoyed. A part of Seb expected things to change, maybe, after he and Watson fucked for the second time. A better omega would mind, would want to talk about his feelings or be reassured that he hasn’t done anything wrong, but Seb’s just pissed about it. As pissed as he can be, anyway, given that Watson promised him absolutely nothing and owes him absolutely nothing.

Nothing is what he gets. They don’t talk about it. Even Sherlock doesn’t, outside of the occasional innuendo; Watson’s clearly gotten to him. Seb keeps his head down, does his job. Isobel is somewhere between crawling and actually walking and he’s deeply grateful to have the job so that at least he gets thirty or forty hours of peace a week. 

But he wants-- he wants to be more than just Isobel’s mother. He wants someone to look at him and actually see him, someone to come home to, someone in his bed.

He goes out for drinks with the team once in a while, and lets an alpha pick him up and fuck him, but it only makes him lonelier.

It makes him a fool, perhaps. An omega, who will do anything at all if it makes someone love him.

Three days before Christmas, when he’s home alone with Isobel, there’s an unexpected knock on the door. He shuts her quietly in the pantry behind a baby gate and slides the Luger out of the safe in the hallway.

The woman on the doorstep is small, fair, and tidy, with a tilt to her chin that instantly screams alpha. “Fleur,” Seb says, opening the door with one hand, keeping the gun behind him. 

She pushes her way in, dropping her shopping bags, and turns to face him: his fierce, earnest little sister, who had been given at birth the thing Seb had fought for all his life. “General Moran,” he says.

“I thought you were dead,” she whispers, and touches his face very gently. “That letter you wrote-- I thought you were dead.” 

Seb remembers. The night of his court martial, when he’d been found guilty, he’d drunk the better part of a bottle of gin and swallowed a bottle of codeine, and written letters to everyone he’d loved, scrawled on hotel stationary and almost illegible because his right hand was still in a cast. Jim had saved him that night, in more ways than one, but Jim had mailed the letters, too. “I’m sorry.”

He pulls her into the kitchen and lifts Isobel up to sit on the table. “”Meet your niece,” he says, but what he means is, never again. 

Isobel, raised by a succession of dailies, has long since lost any shyness she might once have possessed . She sits in Fleur’s lap and gravely accepts the toy farm Fleur brought her, one with hundreds of small animals and tractors and plastic fences that Seb knows will be spread all over the flat by the end of the day. “Good choice,” he says, “she’s absolutely mad about ponies at the moment.”

Fleur rode for Britain at the European Championships and still has two event horses at livery outside London. “Oh, darling,” she says, dropping a kiss on the top of Isobel’s head, “we are absolutely getting you one of your own, then.”

Seb’s missed her, the way you miss something without even realizing what, or why. They were close as children, growing up English in Saudi, and later as Arabs in England, never quite at home. And they’d seen each other often over the years, met for coffee or dinner in Kabul, Baghdad, Fallujah. And still, between them, there are the years he spent with Jim, that he cannot, will not, talk about with anyone-- the years and the things he barely even lets himself remember. 

When Isobel’s gone to sleep in his lap, smeared with chocolate from the cookies Fleur brought, and the tea is cool in the mugs on the table, Fleur says, “Papa told me you weren’t well, that he thought your alpha-- but you look well to me, Seb.”

“I am,” he says, “He’s not my alpha, he’s only Isobel’s father, but we manage. And he loves her.”

“I’m so glad.” And he thinks she means it, her face alight with it. “Isobel is so lovely.” 

And Seb says, “Papa said you couldn’t, and Peter couldn’t-- that neither of you could carry a child, and that you needed an omega surrogate but that there wasn’t much hope. Fleur, I could-- I will.”

He sees her absorb it as if it were a blow. “Seb--.”

“I want to,” he says. Maybe he even means it. Maybe he only wants to be sure she can never leave him again.

She’s not capable of carrying to term, as so many female alphas aren’t, and Peter has an old wound that took his uterus. And unmated omegas are so rare, and carrying a child for someone else and giving it up is so difficult. There is nothing else he could have offered she would have wanted as she wants this. Still, she tries not to take it, to say that it’s too much, but she never looks away from Isobel, saying it. 

He’d been supposed to get the new omega-specific IUD after his next heat. Instead, three days after Christmas he goes with Fleur and Peter to their doctor to get the first of the hormone injections. Twelve days after that they implant the embryos and sixteen days after that he’s officially pregnant.

Seb doesn’t mean it to be a secret. He plans to tell work after the first trimester, and he means to tell Watson pretty much immediately, but Watson never seems to be there to talk to and Fleur’s sent back to Afghanistan and the hormones make him feel fantastic. So he wears a compression tank to flatten his breasts down and belts his trousers a little lower and makes sure no one from his team sees him in the shower. He gains a couple of pounds, but not, apparently, enough to show. 

Sometimes he thinks that the only one who ever noticed, the only one who ever really saw Seb, was Jim. The thought is terrifying.

He shops for baby furniture with Peter, who is lovely, in exactly the sarcastic, vicar-ish, ex-RAF way he’d have chosen for Fleur. He runs, he lifts, he takes advantage of the hormones to put on muscle, he takes Isobel to the park, he sometimes shoots at people; he doesn’t think about the baby at all. It’s not his, he’s just the incubator.

And then Mycroft Holmes summons him to a particularly damp and bleak interrogation room. The prisoner is Syrian, a political refugee, from the kennel of an alpha killed recently in Aleppo: thin, terrified, exhausted, belly visibly swollen with a pregnancy a month or two further gone than Seb’s, the line of his collar still etched into his neck. They don’t look much alike, except superficially: tall for omegas, fair-haired, light-eyed-- and Arabic-speaking, which is almost certainly the point.

Afterward Anthea leads Seb into Mycroft’s office and stands guard at the door. “You want me to go undercover as a pregnant omega slave,” Seb says.

“We could use the intel. Things have not been going particularly well in that part of the world,” Mycroft says dryly. “I hardly need tell you, Captain, how many lives this could save.”

Seb spent six years of active duty there. He’s well aware of the damage a hundred and fifty years of European and American occupation has done. “I’m pregnant,” he says. “Really pregnant, I mean. I can’t--.”

“People carry babies in war zones,” Mycroft says. “If our friend Yakalb hadn’t managed to defect--.”

“He was sold to al-Zahar when he was eleven,” Seb says. “This is his fifth pregnancy. His other children were taken away as soon as they were born and he doesn’t know if they lived. Al-Zahar’s brother sold him to Rafiq Shakur for a case of AKs and a 1998 Toyota Land Cruiser. Women carry babies, sir, not male omegas. Not in the Middle East.”

“I’m well aware of the situation--.”

“No,” Seb says. “You aren’t. His name isn’t Yakalb. He doesn’t have a name. Yakalb-- they called him Dog, is all. That’s how they thought of him.”

“And that’s why you should--.”

“I blew up a bus full of kids in Kabul once,” Seb says, “because it was my job. Don’t you fucking tell me what I should do, sir. Don’t you make this about you and me and him, some kind of sisterhood omega bullshit.” He gets up, abruptly; very gratifyingly Mycroft flinches.  
“I’ll go,” he says. “Christ knows you’ll never find another pregnant male omega.” He’s been so careful to keep this secret, but of course there is no keeping secrets from Mycroft Holmes. Now he lets himself touch the slight curve of his belly, camouflaged by three layers of shirts. Not his baby. But he knows it will be loved, is loved already, no matter who it turns out to be. Fleur and David, he trusts absolutely to love it. “Two weeks,” he says, “and you pull me out when I say so.”

Sherlock and John are gone again, which is convenient. Seb sets Isobel in the empty tub with Thomas the train engine and stands in front of the mirror, psyching himself up. His hair is military short, still, only a little gray noticeable among the blond. As a child he’d seen omegas in Saudi, all of them female, most of them beautiful under their layers of veils, groomed as carefully as the sheikhs’ thoroughbreds. In the end, Seb’s mother had bolted rather than leave; he wonders sometimes if she was still alive, in a jasmine-scented harem on the edge of the desert. 

There had been male omegas among the refugees in Kosovo, the first Muslim ones he’d met, and they’d born a closer resemblance to Yakalb, heads uncovered and hands calloused with work. Seb couldn’t’ve faked pampered pet if he tried. He peels off his three layers of shirts and stares grimly at himself. Too much muscle, and the shrapnel scars and the tiger tattoo don’t really fit, either. The upside is that his pregnancy makes him untouchable; with luck Rafiq Shakur won’t ever see him with his clothes off.

Seb clips his hair even shorter, until there’s barely stubble, and lines his eyes in kohl. It makes him look androgynous, almost frail, cheekbones cast in sharp relief. But his eyes are still a soldier’s, cool, hard, gunmetal gray. Fortunate, then, that no one expects eye contact from an omega.

The part he’s least prepared for is the part where they put Yakalb’s collar around his neck. It’s been illegal in Britain to collar an omega since the 1920s, so Seb’s never worn one, never even known anyone who wore one. It’s all he can do not to worry at it until his neck is bleeding. Collared means owned, in every country and every language he knows.

The British Army flies him to Aleppo and finds him a ride most of the way to Damascus, in the bed of a cattle truck driven by a secret policeman. The timing is about right, since al-Zahar’s first wife had told Yakalb to walk halfway across war-torn Syria, illiterate and barefoot, with only the robes on his back and a water bottle and loaf of bread. The timing is right, if Yakalb had not found a soft- hearted British officer who spoke fluent Arabic and begged for his asylum for his unborn child. It’s hard for Seb to imagine, the courage it must have taken-- or the desperation.

“You and me, kid,” he says to Fleur’s baby, there in the road to Damascus, and, Christ-- Fleur would kill him if she knew about this. No one knows about this. Mycroft is meant to be taking care of things, which possibly means sending Watson and Sherlock on an intricate wild goose chase, re-igniting the war in Afghanistan to distract Fleur, and causing an epidemic of personal issues among David’s parishioners.  
Of all the mad things Seb’s done, this might be the maddest. He touches the collar at his throat, worn smooth by its years around another man’s neck, and wonders how Yakalb feels without it. If Jim were alive, he’d probably say that Seb was doing this to get John Watson’s attention, and probably be right; a part of Seb thinks that he can somehow make up for the last ten years of his life, make Watson love him or at least want him. It’s possible Seb is a self-destructive idiot, whose only long-term relationship was with a madman, and who is now pregnant with his sister’s baby and walking voluntarily into a warzone. 

It’s almost a relief to see the city rising to meet him; Seb is a soldier, first, last, and always, and a part of him is only alive under fire. He squints up at the towers of Damascus, hazy in the sun, for a moment before he bows his head like a proper omega.


End file.
